Saturday, 19 January 2013

Five for Friday!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for her Five for Friday linky party. I get to choose five random happenings from this week and blog about it! This is perfect for me because I'm feeling pretty random this week anyway! Click the picture below to check out the other fabulous blogs involed in this week's linky...

1. Our first two weeks back were all about winter, hibernation, and bears! Here is our partially completed bear chart. I think we'll do some bear art and writing next week, instead of starting our penguin unit right away! Although I can't wait to read Tacky! He is my favourite little penguin. I just bought "Tacky Goes to Camp".... It was the only one I didn't have yet! Oh, and did you hear there's a new one coming out?? "Happy Birdday, Tacky!" will be released May 14, 2013! Fun!

2. My class is finally starting to settle down behaviour wise, but the biggest problem I am having is blurting out! They are all in the "I-am-the-most-important-person-in-the-room-and-I-have-something-important-to-say-so-I'll-just-blurt-it-out" stage. No matter how much discussion and modelling and practicing we did, they just kept blurting out! So I brought out my whole brain teaching scoreboard from First Grade Fever (I used this for Class? Yes! at the beginning of the year) for a week long friendly competition. We wrote the goal in the middle and I started giving the kids a tally mark for each (yes, each!) time a hand was raised properly. Each time someone blurted, I got a tally mark. The first day I would reinforce why I was giving myself a tally or praising someone for raising their hand, but by the second day I would just silently write the tally on whichever side. It was AMAZING! It worked so well. Then today at the end of the day we counted all the tallies by 5 (hello math practice!) and saw that the students had won so we played a little game to celebrate! Next week we are going to focus on a different skill (maybe coming to the carpet quickly and quietly).

3. I've got my Winter Math Stations all set up. The kids really enjoy them! They are sad if I skip them to do a whole group lesson! :)

4. We are practicing our tens partners in addition right now, so we played this easy card game. It is an individual game and the kids really enjoyed it!! All you need is a deck of cards from ace to ten. Students place nine cards face up in a 3x3 grid and keep the other cards in a stack. Students look to see if they have two cards that are tens partners (A-9, 2-8, etc.) and remove those cards and place them in a pairs pile. Then they replace those two cards with two new cards from the stack. The goal is to get all the cards partnered up and removed. If there is a ten, they get to just remove it by itself! I have also seen some people use kings as zeros though, so 10 and 0 (king) would be tens partners. I thought this might be confusing for my guys though, so I just left the ten by itself.

5. In Writer's Workshop we are working on writing personal narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. I read the story "My Trip to the Hospital" by Mercer Mayer and we practiced retelling the story in beginning/middle/end format. Then we orally told stories about a time we got hurt. Finally we wrote our stories out. They turned out pretty cute. We made our good copies into large bandaids. I forgot to give them a real bandaid to stick onto the cover! We'll do that on Monday! :)

That's it for tonight! I need some cuddle time with my puppies before bed. Good night, all!

I found your blog via Doodle Bugs' linky and am your newest follower. Love the blog! Your ideas in this post are fantastic. My little ones are in the blurting out phase as well. I'm thinking a little friendly competition might need to pop into the classroom. I also loved the big band aid to place their finished writings on. How adorable!

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